Adams Fall
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Sean Desmond |
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| Publisher | St. Martin's Press |
| Honors | |
| It’s an especially bleak and gray October at the College, and the brooding protagonist of Adams Fall finds himself under the classic strains of first semester senior year-a thesis to write, grad schools and fellowships to apply for, a future to ponder, and a girlfriend to elude. A full, but manageable load for any bright-eyed, self-starting English honors student. But our protagonist resides in Adams House’s reportedly haunted B-entry where he becomes eerily attuned to its dark, gothic strength, creaking floorboards, and shadowy stairwell and tunnels.… | |
It’s an especially bleak and gray October at the College, and the brooding protagonist of Adams Fall finds himself under the classic strains of first semester senior year-a thesis to write, grad schools and fellowships to apply for, a future to ponder, and a girlfriend to elude. A full, but manageable load for any bright-eyed, self-starting English honors student.
But our protagonist resides in Adams House’s reportedly haunted B-entry where he becomes eerily attuned to its dark, gothic strength, creaking floorboards, and shadowy stairwell and tunnels. And when he finds himself the object of the house’s sinister attentions, his world quickly begins to unravel. As his grades and aspirations slip, so slips his mind…
Into his crumbling Ivy League existence enters a charming and vindictive playboy from the College’s past who continually harasses the protagonist about the circumstances surrounding the suicide of his freshman year roommate. When faced with the grisly murder of a woman he had been cheating on his girlfriend with, our desperate protagonist resolves to discover the identity of this depraved spirit, put an end to its raging, and restore sanity and some small sliver of success to his final year of school.
With a tip of its hat to Henry James, Adams Fall elegantly blends ghost story and psychological thriller, and terrifyingly reveals how academic pressures can quickly build into murderous paranoia.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Harvard’s Adams House has a checkered past—ghosts in the attic, shadowy tunnels under the basement, and a history of student suicides and murders. The present isn’t much sunnier, especially for the nameless protagonist, a senior plagued by memories of his freshman roommate’s death and haunted by a specter who’s got a few scores to settle before he quits this earthly realm for good. Author Sean Desmond, a Harvard graduate, takes us deep inside the drug and spirit-ridden head of his main character, who’s got girlfriend troubles as well as a thesis to finish, a guilty secret to hide, and a problem or two with reality. It doesn’t endear us to this overprivileged twit, but it adds to the Gothic atmosphere, which is laid on with a heavy hand. The ghost from the past is a much more interesting figure. He’s a vindictive playboy with charm that doesn’t quite equal his prescience in choosing a target whose descent into madness—and maybe murder—is horrifyingly depicted. In this, his debut novel, Desmond shows signs of an emerging talent. Unfortunately it’s not fully realized in this somewhat muddled, though exceptionally creepy, tale. —Jane Adams
